After the ‘racist van’ debacle, what now for Britain’s immigration policy?

The Home Office’s controversial van posters are being investigated by the Advertising Standards Authority (Picture: PA)

‘UKBA, go away! UKBA, go home!’

It is 11am outside a shopping centre in Southall, west London, and the entrance is thronging with protesters.

With the aid of some megaphones and banners, they are turning the Home Office’s slogan back on UK Border Agency staff who are manning the doors as officers check workers’ documents and fingerprints inside.

Acting on a tip-off, immigration officers have come in search of three people suspected of overstaying long after their visas had expired.

Metro was not here by chance. The government organised a co-ordinated day of action – ‘Operation Compliance’ – and invited journalists to get a close look at the long arm of the immigration system as 200 raids took place across the UK.

The Home Office wants you to know it is serious about illegal immigration, hence the controversial poster van campaign bearing that now-infamous phrase: ‘Go home or face arrest’.

It also wants you to know it is actually getting rid of people living here illegally… or, at least, it did. Because since the raids at the beginning of this month, the department has become rather media-shy.

Its reticence comes in the wake of the Unite union calling the billboards ‘vans of hate’, UKIP leader Nigel Farage describing the approach as ‘nasty, unpleasant, Big Brother’, business secretary Vince Cable calling it ‘stupid and offensive’ and a local council leader damning it as ‘an act of desperation’.

The coalition partners in the Home Office are in a stalemate as Tories try to take a hard line and the Liberal Democrats resist. Nick Clegg said no Lib Dems were even consulted on the van plan, which might explain why the Home Office declined to answer any of Metro’s questions, despite being given more than a week for a response. Civil servants are either off enjoying the sunshine or things are getting very heated inside their Westminster offices.

The department would not even confirm how many people had been detained after the Southall raid – turning up an opportunity to hail a mission accomplished.

It would not answer how many fines had been issued to rogue employers. And it would not provide any evidence to back up Downing Street’s assertion – just a day after the pilot had ended – that the controversial vans had already proved to be working.

Instead, it released a comment from immigration minister Mark Harper, saying: ‘We are working very closely with a lot of community groups who welcome the opportunity for someone who’s not here legally to leave the country in a dignified way, rather than being arrested, detained and removed.’

Meena Patel, from campaign group Southall Black Sisters, was one of the women behind the megaphones.

She said the spontaneous protest was against ‘the way in which the state is targeting black and minority communities’. She said: ‘It’s happening even on buses. This is about bringing ID cards through the back door just for black communities.

‘If I’m walking down the street, you won’t know if I’m illegal or not, so you’d be wrong to stop me and start questioning me.’

Ms Patel said ministers should stop focusing on the ‘insignificant’ issue of illegal immigration altogether.

She added: ‘It’s a bit like Nazi Germany, in the sense of having to carry ID cards and the stop and searching of people.

‘What you’re creating is an animosity in communities amongst each other and also between white and black people.

‘What they’re trying to do is build up a frenzy of hate,’ she said, adding: ‘It’s about votes.’

David Goodhart, director of think tank Demos and author of The British Dream: Successes and Failures of Post-War Immigration, told Metro the parallel being drawn with Nazism was ‘not worth commenting on, it is so absurd’.

He said: ‘Nazi Germany was a racist state without the rule of law in which certain minorities had no rights, including the right to live. Does that sound like modern Britain?

‘The illegal immigrants either live in a semi-criminal twilight world where they are especially vulnerable to exploitation or they try to join the mainstream without playing by the rules, paying their taxes and so on.

‘There is such a thing as society and it has some basic rules; the most basic of all is you must be there legally.’

Mr Goodhart said the ‘go home’ slogan was a mistake, but claimed there was support for the van campaign.

He said: ‘It reassures people that the authorities are worrying about illegal immigration and gives a few illegal immigrants who may be in a desperate situation the opportunity to get funded to leave the country.

‘But this is not about race, it is about trust, legality and citizenship – and people are perfectly capable of making this distinction.’

So what next? Will we simply see more illegal immigration and the UKBA officers ‘going home’? Or will it be more vans, more stops and more raids?